A Werewolf Among Us

SEVENTEEN: More Than a Case Is Ended

"You got him!" Dane shouted.

St. Cyr snapped, "Stay down!"

The boy dropped back behind a shelter made from a lounge chair and about a hundred hardbound volumes of popular Darmanian history which he had pulled from the shelves.

"I hit him square in the chest," Hirschel said. "But if the damage had been serious, he'd be lying there in the doorway. Do you see him?"

"No," Dane said sheepishly.

Tina was on her knees again, and she leaned close to St. Cyr to whisper, "May I stay here with you? I think this is a better firing position than the one I was in."

That was not the reason she wished to remain beside him, however. But he could not find heart to argue with her. "Stay," he said.

In the next instant Teddy shot through the doorway without warning, moving far faster than St. Cyr had ever imagined that he could. He had angled his body trunk ninety degrees from his gravplate mobility system, which was fitted under his base on a heavy ball joint. The result was that he came at them lying on his side, offering the smallest possible target. Even if they could snap a shot straight into his undercarriage, there were no mechanisms to be damaged, only the heavy ball joint that moved the gravplates, and this was too solid to succumb to a vibra-beam.

St. Cyr fired, missed.

"Look out!" Tina cried.

Teddy struck the writing desk behind which they were hiding, smashed through the top of it "feet first," showering splintered wood into the air, crumpling the piece of furniture like eggshell. His advance did not seem at all diminished by the collision. He struck St, Cyr's bad shoulder with nearly enough force to rip the detective's arm from its socket, then rocketed past, deeper into the library.

Hirschel fired, must have missed, and cursed.

Small hands pulled pieces of the desk from St. Cyr and brushed splinters from his face. "You all right?" Tina asked.

He blinked, nodded, and tried to sit up.

Across the room, Teddy soared to the high ceiling like a bat loose in a house, dropped behind Dane, leveled off and slammed hard into the boy as he turned to take aim with his pistol. Dane was tossed into the bookshelves as if he were made of clay; he got out one choked scream before he fell forward on his face. He might or might not be dead. Clearly, though, he was out of the fight for good.

"My rifle," St. Cyr said.

Tina said, "It's smashed."

"Where's your pistol?"

She looked around, came up with it.

"Give it to me."

Hirschel scored a hit, fell and twisted away as the robot dived in towards him.

St. Cyr fired three times in rapid succession as the master unit, though still lying on its side, parallel to the floor, passed length-on to him, offering an excellent target. All three of the shots, the pulses of light showed, were wide of the mark.

"Terrible shooting," she said.

"My shoulder hurts like a bitch," he said. That much was perfectly true. But the excuse for such inexcusably bad marksmanship on the part of a professional rang hollow even in his own ear; he had pulled off those three bursts of fire knowing they were wide.

Teddy swung back on Hirschel just as the hunter gained his feet, struck his left hip and spun him violently around. Hirschel's knees caught on the arm of a chair and he went down hard, his head striking the back of the chair with a sickening dull thud. He did not move.

Teddy swung in St. Cyr's direction, located him and started forward at top speed.

St. Cyr shot, missed, shot again, fell to the side as the robot careened past.

"Give me the gun," Tina said, holding out a slim, brown hand.

St. Cyr pushed her rudely away as Teddy streaked back on them and passed within an inch of the spot where her head had been. He rolled, despite his throbbing shoulder, and fired again. The pulse of light, tattling on his bad shooting, passed two feet above the master unit.

What in hell was wrong?

For once, the bio-computer had no suggestion.

Foolishly, Jubal had picked up a chair and was crossing the room in quick, heavy steps, brandishing the impossible weapon as if he could frighten the robot away with the threat of a severe beating.

"Get back. Stay down!" St. Cyr called.

Jubal could not hear him, or did not want to. Perhaps, in this useless display of bravery, he hoped to cancel out everything that St. Cyr had said to him in the last several hours; wipe out his wife's and his daughter's agreement with that judgment; prove that, after all, he could care about someone besides himself, something else besides his art.

Teddy rose, dived, leveled out and smashed the chair from the old man's hands, sending him tumbling backwards. He landed in a heap at his wife's feet. Alicia bent over him and patted his face. She seemed almost too calm as she pointedly ignored the chaos around her — and when it was all over, if she were somehow still alive, she would most likely have some screaming to do.

"Give me that gun!" Tina insisted.

"Stay down," St. Cyr said. "Or get out of here." He ignored her reaching hand and got clumsily to his feet. He did not dare look at his shoulder. The pain was bad enough. He did not want to have to match the pain with the sight of all that blood from the opened wound. Somehow he twisted fast enough to avoid Teddy's next pass, turned and stumbled into the rows of ceiling-high bookshelves that paralleled the rear wall of the room and took up a third of the chamber's space. He leaned against a shelf of mystery novels and tried to regain his breath and at least some of his nerve. He had to be calm, because he simply had to shoot better.

A moment later Teddy found him. The master unit soared into the far end of the aisle between the books, struck straight for St. Cyr's chest. When the cyberdetective fell to avoid being battered to death, the robot checked its forward speed with surprising rapidity, curved up and to the right to avoid ploughing disastrously into the stone wall behind the wood paneling, and smashed noisily through the shelving and bound volumes on that side. It burst into the second aisle, which paralleled the first, in a rain of torn paper and splintered wood.

Tina appeared at the end of the first passage and shouted, "Baker!"

"Get out of here."

She started towards him.

"For God's sake, run!"

Teddy exploded through the books and shelving again, destroying a good portion of the library's collection of 20th-century American authors, oblivious of any possibility of damage to his own mechanisms, then dropped at St. Cyr like a stone.

Tina screamed.

St. Cyr tried to run.

Instead of crushing his skull down to his kneecaps as it had intended, the master unit glanced off his good shoulder and sent him tumbling like a clown. Full-length on the floor of the aisle, both shoulders jammed full of intensely hot pins, St. Cyr wondered why he had not yet tried to shoot the robot while it was limited in its maneuvers by the dimensions of the aisle.

A robot is harmless property.

He's a killer.

Illogical.

St. Cyr rolled, trying to make up for lost time, and nearly ground his teeth down to the gums in a single instant as pain cascaded through him like a torrent through a suddenly opened sluice gate. He fired straight up at the machine as it dived like a hammer for his head, chewed on what was left of his teeth, and rolled again.

He had missed.

A robot is harmless, valuable property.

Bullshit.

Useless emotion.

St. Cyr scrambled across the aisle, wriggled through the lowest shelf, pushing the books ahead of him into the next passageway. He crossed that and was into the third before Teddy smashed through the shelving after him.

"Baker!"

He looked around, could not see her.

He ran to the end of the aisle as Teddy smashed through from the second and soared after him.

"Baker, where are you?"

"Get out, dammit!"

He had forgotten Teddy, listening to her call. He sensed the imminence of disaster a second before it was to happen, threw himself to the left, screamed as his wounded shoulder caught the edge of a shelf. Teddy boomed through the place he had been standing.

"Baker!"

He pushed through the books into the fourth aisle, squirmed through another low shelf into the fifth and last passageway. He was not as upset by the blank wall facing him as he should have been; for a long moment there, he had wondered if there would be an end to the aisles or if he had accidentally entered some unimaginably subtle purgatory in which the books went on and on forever.

No door here, though. Well, he had specified a room with only one entrance…

Somewhere farther back, toward the front of the room, Teddy tore another hole in the neatly racked books. A weakened shelf sighed as nails pulled slowly free, screeched abruptly like a stepped-on cat, and collapsed with a roar of spilled knowledge.

The house computer had referred to Teddy as a berserker. At the time, that had not been exactly true, for the master unit had been operating on a set of carefully laid plans. Now, however, when his plans had fallen through, he was indeed a berserker. Apparently, when Walter Dannery programmed the robot for murder, he thought to place in it a final directive to take precedence in a crisis: If all else fails, throw caution to the wind, attack and destroy.

Three hundred and fifty pounds of master unit traveling at twenty miles an hour — say only ten or fifteen miles an hour in the confines of the room — generated how much force, how much impact, how much potential for destruction? Too goddamned much. Shortly, there would not be any aisles in which to hide.

Books slapped to the floor again as shelving protested, splintered, and fell down before the robot.

Tina screamed.

Another crash.

Books fluttering like birds.

"Baker, help me!"

St. Cyr ran to the end of the aisle and, keeping to the wall, ran past the succeeding passageways, looking quickly into each. He found both the girl and the robot in the second corridor. She had fallen in a mound of rumpled books and seemed to have twisted her ankle. The master unit was completing a turn, right in front of St. Cyr, that would take it back towards her in one last deadly plunge.

"Baker!"

She had seen him.

He fired at the master unit, missed.

He damned the bio-computer that was attached to him, knew that he had no time to stop, calmly deactivate it, wait for the filaments to leave his body, unplug it and put it down. She would be dead by then.

"Here!" he shouted.

He tossed the gun to her. It glanced off a shiny-backed book by her hand and clattered across the floor, stopping a dozen feet behind her.

"Hurry!" he shouted.

She turned and scrambled after the weapon, slipped, fell, pushed up, reached, had it.

Teddy started after her.

Suddenly St. Cyr knew that she would not have enough time to stop it. Teddy could take the vibra-beam long enough to slam brutally into her and pass on by her broken body. And as abruptly as that realization came, so came the breakdown in the wall of his psyche, the wall that had shielded him from certain portions of the past for a long, long time now. In that instant he knew who the stalker in his nightmare was, remembered Angela, remembered her face in death, saw dark hair and dark eyes, saw her metamorphose into Tina… He screamed and lunged forward, leapt for the robot that had already begun to move away from him.

Luckily, his hands caught under what would have been a chin if it were human; he tried to drag it backwards, like a child wrestling with a dog three times his size.

Teddy swiveled his head, attempted to wrench free of the detective, his angle of approach to Tina shifting as he failed.

Tina had turned and was holding the pistol before her in both hands. Like a caveman who thinks he can beat an armored tank with nothing more than a slingshot, thought St. Cyr as he rode the silver robot.

A robot is harmless, valuable property.

St. Cyr's weight sufficiently deflected the master unit, sent it into the shelves beside the girl, where books had already been spilled. It brushed her skirt, nothing more.

Teddy tried to climb now; he rose a dozen feet, lifting the detective free of the floor.

St. Cyr's battered arms were so strained and bleeding that they had gone numb. He just hoped that the paralysis did not creep into his hands and force him to relinquish his hold on the master unit. How long could the damn thing go on like this? It was feeding a good bit of energy into its gravplate mobility-system to be able to perform like this. Its batteries couldn't last forever without a recharge from the house generator. No matter what happened to his arms, he could surely hold out longer than Teddy…

Smoothly, Teddy's arms raised, bent backwards in an impossibly complex movement that was no strain at all on the special ball joints and the double-elbow lever system. The steel fingers closed around St. Cyr's wrists and squeezed.

He screamed, kicked, but held on.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Tina had moved and was sighting on the plate that covered the majority of the robot's control terminals.

Teddy shifted his grip on St. Cyr's left hand and carefully broke that thumb in one clean jerk.

Tina fired.

Teddy methodically broke the little finger on the same hand, where the thumb hung like a rag. St. Cyr let go with that arm, blackness bubbling up inside of him. Yet he would not let go with his other arm.

Tina fired again — three short, quick bursts.

Teddy was slammed sideways into the bookshelves, dragging the detective with him. St. Cyr felt a sharp thrust of broken shelving pierce his thigh.

Tina stepped closer and shot again.

Teddy hissed, squawked as he changed voice tapes in a desperate attempt to put together a few last words, perhaps some last epithet that Dannery had programmed into him. He could not do it. The hiss died with a pop, like a balloon exploding under the sharp jab of a pin, and the robot fell to the floor twelve feet below, landing on top of the cyberdetective, who had not let go. Teddy was finished.

And so am I, St. Cyr thought.

Emotional nonsense.

Blackness bubbled completely over him. This time, instead of a nightmare there was a pleasant warmth, soft light, Angela and Tina standing before him with their arms outstretched. He went to be with them forever.